Indonesia is the world’s biggest producer of shark-related products, WWF Bali told us this week, and indeed Times reporters spotted such delicacies widely available around the island – from upmarket supermarkets to tiny fishing villages.

This deplorable accolade comes at a time when shark is being widely overfished, its stocks dramatically plunging below sustainable breeding levels.

Not only does such frenetic shark fishing endanger the creature; it also hurts ecosystems and, above ground, the economy, especially, for Bali, in terms of tourism. Many people from around the world travel to this island to witness the wonders of the deep and what they hold. Only last week, there was news of yet more new marine species being discovered in this, one of the great biodiverse regions of the world that tantalizes divers.

In Indonesia, the WWF says, there is widespread disdain of the shark – king of the seas – because of its largely unwarranted sobriquet of man-eater. The WWF has been successful in getting shark off the menu of Jakarta restaurants, but regrettably it’s an uphill battle to educate consumers – as is all too evident in Bali.

Last week at least one high-end supermarket - near the airport and catering to expatriates, affluent Indonesians and foreign tourists – was selling translucent boxes of dried shark fin – for up to Rp900,000 (almost US$100) a pop. Especially popular among Chinese, shark fin is the result of a violently brutal procedure in which the fish’s dorsal fin is hacked off, the body often cast back into the ocean, leaving the fatally wounded creature to die an agonizing death.

For all people of conscience, such items on menus or in stores should be outright rejected.

Meanwhile, anyone paying a visit to coastal communities and their fishing endeavors will be shocked to see a wide variety of stunning marine life that deserves to remain in the water and not end up on a plate.

Consumption of shark, it appears, is right up there with vanity – and a vain attempt to enhance one’s virility – showing others you can afford this exotic, expensive food, even when it is nutrition-less cartilage containing dangerously high levels of poisonous mercury. This, lest we forget, is a majestic fish that has swum the earth’s oceans for more than 400 million years, before the dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Charles Frew, director of Asiatic Marine in Hong Kong, told The Times this week that the Chinese territory is the “shark fin capital of the world” and that most such products come from Indonesia and other countries in the region.

As there is no regulation of shark fishing in Indonesia, or of many other sea creatures, it is high time the government puts into place stringent legislation that will tip the balance firmly in favor of the fish.

On page three of this edition, we chronicle the story of a young Balinese woman who was forced to marry at 10, bore children and then, destitute, traveled with her family, and Rp50,000 (US$5.42) in her pocket, from her remote eastern village to eek out a pitiful living begging on the blistering streets of Kuta.

She is not alone.

As detailed in the story by Times reporter Rian Dewanto, an entire community of Balinese beggars lives in one building in Denpasar alone.

Anyone who traverses the main thoroughfares of southern Bali is all too aware of the rising numbers of beggars pleading for coins at fume-engulfed traffic lights.

For a caring island with its societal roots steeped in helping the less fortunate, this is a heartbreaking human tragedy.

Our story reveals how this starving mother, ashamed at what her life has been reduced to and physically assaulted by security officials, she claims, instructs her young children, one only 2 years old and carried on the back of her 7-year-old brother, to approach vehicles for cash, their innocent lives cut short, an education not for them, their health dangerously imperiled amid the spiraling toxicity of the streets that gives them chronic headaches daily.

No one is doing anything to help these people that are in most urgent, desperate need, clinging to life, literally begging to live, all hopes dashed.

There are many groups here looking after the welfare of animals – dogs, orangutans, marine life – and that is to be highly commended. But can we please also start taking care of our own species, our fellow man?

We are letting ourselves badly down as a community if we continue to let this happen.

With this editorial, The Bali Times launches an initiative to help the street people of Bali, to get them into gainful employment and put their children in school so their lives can begin anew and they can regain their innocence lost.

Will you help?

Suggestions:
samaritan@thebalitimes.com

Donations:
streetfund@thebalitimes.com

From day one this year, the country has been hit by unceasing disasters, yet whether acts of God or human error, there is a lot that can be done to protect people. Regrettably, there appears to be scant urgency, and much less concern, in learning from disaster lessons.

If military accounts that the Garuda Indonesia plane that burst into flames last Wednesday morning upon landing at Yogyakarta’s airport, killing at least 21 people, was traveling too fast and overshot the runway are true, it signals a deplorable state of affairs for a national aviation sector already reeling from recent disasters such as the Adam Air jet that disappeared off Sulawesi on New Year’s Day with over a hundred on board and, incredibly, still has not been located. Elsewhere there have been near misses, including one last Friday, when a Merpati Nusantara plane had to make an emergency landing on Batam island when the craft sprung a serious oil leak.

How Transport Minister Hatta Rajasa can keep his head up – or his job – is anyone’s guess.

Every pilot knows the approach and landing speed of the aircraft they were rigorously trained for, in this case the staple Boeing 737-400. Such basic, unchanging, data are even available on the internet. This time, weather cannot be blamed for the Garuda accident, because it was a fine, clear morning. So why this craft plunged into a ricefield and became engulfed in an inferno is truly perplexing.

As baffling was the emergency services at Adisutjipto Airport – one of the country’s busiest - and their response to this aircraft engulfed in flames. What appeared to be a sole fire hose with all the strength of a garden sprinkler was no match for the billowing flames.

Just days earlier, meanwhile, some 52 people lost their lives in earthquake-ridden Sumatra, when flimsy buildings collapsed in the magnitude 6.3 temblor that also rattled nearby Singapore. It doesn’t take this page to remind people the we have been here before.

Solely imposing age limits on aircraft, as the government proposes, with a 10-year span, is not enough, as the latest Garuda tragedy proves, as it was a relatively young airliner. Stronger enforcement of safety regulations already in place, in the midst of a seemingly blasé attitude of some operators, is essential. Similarly, as we have suggested before, firm regulations on the sturdy construction of homes and other buildings right across the archipelago, but especially in quake-prone areas, is a must.

Anything else is letting the people down. Again.

We heartily applaud the government’s announcement that it plans to provide visas of four months’ duration to tourists, and to increase spending on promoting the nation’s tourism sector.

      The vice president, who made the announcement last week, is a man with his finger firmly on the pulse of the economy and unlike others who have gone before him, Yusuf Kalla has a keen interest in tourism as one of Indonesia’s engines.

      This was clear when he recently urged all tourism-related operators in the country to bandy together and promote Indonesia using Bali as the focus to attract vacationers here.

      The previous administration’s doing away with the free on-arrival visa for tourists was foolish and short-sighted. While it added to the government’s coffers, with tens of millions of dollars flowing in from fees, it generally had a negative impact on the nation’s tourism sector, at a time when it was already in crisis.

      Foreigners complained they were limited to just 30 days’ visit – woefully insufficient time for the many interested in traversing the sprawling nation to experience its myriad tourism jewels.  

      Additionally, there has been scant news on where exactly all those millions in visa fees have gone. If 3.98 million people arrived here last year, according to government figures, and the average tourist visa cost US$25, that adds up to almost $100 million in cash that the public has a right to know about.

      Back then, the blinkered and self-serving government used the nonsensical premise that open-style visas let in “terrorists” and other undesirables to usher in its new and flawed policy. 

      At least now the fog of uncertainty is lifting and once again the country is fittingly welcoming people from around with world with open arms – and that famed Indonesian smile.

If the United States and its dwindling coalition partners ever do succeed in Iraq and withdraw, it will surely go down as one of the greatest Pyrrhic victories of all time.

That’s not likely to happen any year soon, however.

Despite the trillions of dollars poured into post-invasion Iraq and the tens of thousands of lives lost, the country remains on the precipice of total collapse, and it is difficult to see how the current security crackdown will go any way towards bringing it back from the brink.

“All we see is more roadblocks and more delays,” one Iraqi told the BBC as American troops pored into key cities last week in an attempt to dampen the raging bloodshed that has been raging out of control since the war started almost four years ago.

As many commentators have pointed out, peace in Iraq is not on the horizon so long as thousands of American and other foreign troops remain in the country, attracting crazed anti-Western militants from right around the region like bees to a honey pot.

The surge of over 20,000 more American soldiers into Iraq will not, as we have said before, bring about calm and an end to the mayhem.

If the current American president is attempting to stave off total collapse in Iraq until his term ends two years from now, and thereby pass the buck to his successor, that will go down in the annals of history as one of the all-time washing of bloody hands by an invader bored with the game and keen to cast it off on someone else.

Nobody wanted this war, and no one, it seems, wants to take charge of it and give all concerned a final way out.

Every year the capital Jakarta is inundated with floods, leaving tens of millions of people in one of the world’s most crowded and badly planned cities literally up to their necks in fetid water.

And yet, as each year rolls by, the authorities continue to be caught off-guard and express faux shock that yet more floodwaters have diverged on residential and business areas.

Now, as the rainy season reaches its zenith, the capital is once again under water in what officials say is the worst flooding in five years – tragically claiming the lives of some 50 people in recent days and rendering 345,000 homeless as the city ground to a sodden halt.

If this isn’t a case of sheer incompetence on the part of city planners and disaster management officials, we don’t know what is.

And if anyone in positions of power needs reminding that the rainy season is an annual occurrence in Indonesia and that parts of Jakarta - which lies beside the Java Sea – are below sea level and are massively prone to flooding unless precautionary measures like run-off channels are put into place, they do not deserve to be in office one day more.

At least one minister blamed the flooding on massive overdevelopment of inner-city areas with little regard for the environment, particularly citing the ceaseless building of shopping malls – as if mall-dense Jakarta requires more mega shopping complexes.

“There are too many malls in the capital city,” the state-run Antara news agency quoted Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar as saying over the weekend.

Meanwhile, that the State Palace in downtown Jakarta was also in danger of flooding should serve as a national embarrassment to all concerned.

With all the warnings about global warming in recent weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking the end of the world was nigh. That’s especially true in light of an American announcement this week proposing blocking out the sun with large mirrors in space or by shooting sunlight-deflecting dust into the atmosphere.

For sure time is running out in the race to redress the balance, before the warming of the planet reaches such an alarming level – and many say we are already there – that the recent catastrophic and unusual weather around the world would seem like a minor occurrence.

As Earth is the only habitable planet in our solar system, the human species has been doing a deplorable job of looking after it, instead polluting and killing it in the never-ending drive for profit.

China, the rising global industrialist and looming superpower, is already seeing massive pollution in its key cities, with residents suffering badly under clouds of pollution inundating their areas. The global economic machine, it seems, cannot move down a gear when there is money – and political clout – at stake.

United Nations climate experts said in Paris this week that the planet could see a rise of 4.5 degrees Celsius if carbon dioxide emissions double over pre-industrial levels – and that the mercury could rise even higher, spelling doom for many parts of the world, including our own, where some 2,000 of the archipelago’s circa-17,500 islands could be submerged by rising sea levels, according to Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar.

For Sydney alone, global warming will leave it in permanent drought by 2070, with huge seas battering its famous beaches and raging bushfires threatening its outskirts, a report by the government’s scientific agency released on Wednesday says.

It says a 20-centimeter rise in sea levels will result in storm surges of 22 meters on Sydney’s beaches, leaving them eroded and inundating oceanfront properties.

“This might sound like a doomsday scenario, but it’s one we must confront,” State Premier Morris Iemma, who commissioned the report, said.

“We don’t need to be waiting for the impact - it’s real, and it’s here.”